Friday, August 1, 2008

So. The printer that we have been waiting for finally came. Well, it came several days ago on a Tuesday, but we weren’t here, so they didn’t leave it. Just left a note, that they’d be back on Wednesday. I stayed home all afternoon Wednesday, only to walk outside at one point to find a note on my door that they’d TRIED to deliver it, but we didn’t hear them knocking. They’d be back on Thursday between 10:30 am and 5:00 pm. The doorbell has been broken for a long time, much too long, obviously. So I called an electrician. Fine. On Thursday morning about 9:00 I was upstairs puttering around getting the girls ready for swimming lessons, and I thought I heard Thing 2 bumping around, must have been in the closet. I came downstairs about 9:30 to find a note on my door, they’d tried to deliver the printer again.

The electrician came, and fixed the doorbell.

This morning I sat around in the front of the house all morning, and sure enough, up pulls the UPS guy. I didn’t even need my new doorbell. But the thing is so big, looking at that set of about 15 steps coming up to my house, he asks if I have an alleyway. Sure. So he pulls around back and brings it up the alley, through the garage, and onto the back porch. The thing is a monster. It’s slightly smaller than the hummer we rented in Seattle… har har. Not really, of course, but it’s really big. So I start unpacking it on the back patio. I get my hand truck, and bring it inside. Then I start wondering where the heck am I going to put this thing?!?!

So I go into the TV room and get my TV/VCR cabinet which is serving as a side table/VCR storage cabinet, and unload all the crap off of it and out of it. Then I come back into the office, and clean out a bookshelf that tied up one of the corners… and I’m looking at the office thinking I really want to paint in here. What the hell, today’s the day. So I empty out a bunch of stuff…. By now the dining room is looking like a nicely furnished storage shed – it’s a mess on top of my dining table and all around the floor. Painting is a bit of a problem, because the girls catch me and want to help. Of course after enjoying their company for about 5 minutes and snap some photos, but their help creates quite a lot more work for me, and lots of paint I’ve got to clean up on the white trim, and so as politely as I can muster I send them off to play. I don’t have the time or energy to paint the whole office, so I sort of focus on one corner.

Anyway. My goal in all this was to get the printer up and running so Jeff could just walk in and use it tomorrow, because he has a bunch of stuff to do in order to be ready for a huge conference thing he’s got going on next week, and he leaves for that on Sunday.

I move the microwave cart into the half – okay, maybe quarter of the office that is newly painted, and using the packaging material that the printer has been sitting on, I drag it across the floor to the microwave cart. The thing is – I read on the packaging – 83 pounds and they strongly suggest 2 people lift it. Well, at risk of hurting myself or the printer, I lift it myself onto the microwave cart. It fits just fine.

It takes a while to remove all the internal packaging, and install the printer cartridges. I stop for lunch at about 2:30. Back to work.

The next step is to set up the wireless network access on the printer. Here I come to a real problem. I don’t know what any of those things I’m supposed to type into the menu are. It is asking me all sorts of questions that I have no idea whatsoever… and googling WEP and stuff like that isn’t helping… So I’ve been struggling with this, beating my head against this dang thing for an hour and a half.

In the mean time, the girls have swung from playing together nicely to nearly killing each other. They end up in front of the TV, that’s where they don’t argue. Every now and again one of them strolls in looking for something to do, begging to go to the neighbors, or something, and I put them off, trying to get this damn printer to talk to the computer.

Well, it’s after 4:00. I’m sorry for poor Jeff, he’s going to have to configure this thing himself, and I’m sorry for the poor girls, spending the whole day waiting around while I deal with this stupid printer, instead of taking them to Lagoon like I’d hoped and mentioned to them. Now I really need to take some time to clean up the huge messes in the dining room, office, and TV rooms.